Days of fighting killed more than 1,500 people, including some 1,000 civilian members of Assad’s Alawite minority. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that documents the fighting, said security forces or allied militants carried out most of the killings.
The violence has sent shockwaves across Syria, where minorities were hoping for a new beginning after the Sunni Islamist rebels who toppled Assad promised to protect ethnic and religious minorities to preserve and reconcile the country’s diverse society.
Killings Of Armenian Men
The reported killing of two Armenian men in the clashes in the northwestern city of Latakia has terrified members of the tiny Christian minority. Before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, there were estimated to be more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians in Syria.
The Armenian government now believes that 30,000 Armenians remain in the country after more than 60,000 moved to Armenia and elsewhere.
“Everyone is afraid to speak,” Hakob Altunyan, an ethnic Armenian from Latakia who now lives in Yerevan, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “They are afraid to go outside and speak on the phone.”
Altunyan has been frantically calling friends and family in Latakia after the clashes in the region made global news.
“They launched an attack, entered the villages with tanks, and are shooting,” a man Altunyan identified as his friend said in an audio message sent from Latakia.
“We’ve heard that they’ve burned down houses, and we don’t know who is alive and who is dead,” the man said in an audio message Altunyan shared with RFE/RL.
Since the outbreak of violence last week, Dalida Kahejyan, an exiled Syrian Armenian in Yerevan, has been regularly checking in on her daughter in Kessab, a mountainous town in Latakia near the Turkish border.
Schools And Churches Closed
“They have no electricity. Schools and churches there are closed,” she told RFE/RL about the region predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians.
“They think about leaving,” Kahejyan said of Kessab’s residents. “But at present, their passports are not valid.”
Some members of the Armenian community in Syria also have Armenian passports, which is part of Yerevan’s effort to provide some security to the diaspora.
In an interview with Reuters on March 10, Ahmed Sharaa, Syria’s interim president, said the mass killings of Alawites threatened his effort to unite Syrians. He reiterated his resolve to punish those responsible for the massacre, even if they were his allies.
